Matthew Dickman

Love

We fall in love at weddings and auctions, over glasses of wine in Italian restaurants where plastic grapes hang on the lattice, our bodies throb in the checkout line, the bus stop, at basketball games and we can’t keep our hands off each other until we can— so we turn to rubber masks and handcuffs, falling in love again. We go to movies and sit in the air conditioned dark with strangers who are in love with heroes like Peter Parker who loves a girl he can’t have because he loves saving the world in red and blue tights more than he would love to have her ankles wrapped around his waist or his tongue between her legs. While we watch films in which famous people play famous people who experience pain, the boy who sold us popcorn loves the girl who sold us our tickets and stares at the runs in her stockings every night, even though she is in love with the skinny kid who sold her cigarettes at the 7-11, and if the world had any compassion it would let the two of them pass a Marlboro Light back and forth until their fingers eventually touched, their mouths sucking and blowing. If the world knew how the light bulb loved the socket then we would all be better off. We could all dive head first into the sticky parts. We could make sweat a religion and praise the holiness of smelliness.

I am going to stop here, on this dark night, on this country road, where country songs come from, and kiss her, this woman, below the trees which are below the stars, which are below desire. There is a music to it, I hear it. Johnny Rotten, Biggie Smalls, Johan Sebastian Bach, I don’t care what they say— I loved you the way my mouth loves teeth, the way a boy I know would risk it all for a purple dinosaur, who, truth be known, loved him.

In the Midwest, fields of corn are in love with a scarecrow, his potato-sack head and straw body, hanging out among the dog-eared stalks like a farm-Christ full of love.

Turning on the radio I hear how AM loves FM the way my mother loved Elvis whose hips all young girls loved, sitting around the television in a poodle skirt and bobby socks. He LOVED ME TENDER so much that I was born after a long night of Black-Russians and Canasta while “Jailhouse Rock” rocked.

Stamps love envelopes, the licking proves it— just look at my dog who obviously loves himself with an intensity no human being could sustain, though you can’t say we don’t try.

In High school I once cruised a MacDonald’s drive-thru butt-naked on a dare from a beautiful Sophomore, only to be swallowed up by a grief born from super-size or no super-size.

Years later I met a woman named Heavy Metal Goddess at a party where she brought her husband, leading him through the dance floor by a leash, while in Texas cockroaches love with such abandon that they wear their skeletons on the outside.

Once a baby lizard loved me so completely, he moved into my apartment and died of hunger.

No one loves war, but I know a man who loves tanks so much he wishes he had one to pick up the groceries, drive his wife to work, drop his daughter off at school with her Little Mermaid lunch box, a note hidden inside next to the apple, folded with a love that can be translated into any language: I HOPE YOU DO NOT SUFFER.